Note to Self (And Other Middle Aged Long Distance Hiker Aspirants):

Never, EVER, underestimate the power of the trail to humble you. And maybe hurt you a little. Or a lot.

Also:

Your body is not fucking kidding when it says, "STOP."

I didn't listen and I didn't stop when my right ankle started whining at Top of Georgia Hostel.

By the time I was forced to stop, 40 miles later at Winding Stair Gap, the right ankle funk had infected the left ankle and I cried with pain and relief at the sight of my husband, my fearless rescuer, at the trail head. It helped that he brought beer.

I crawled into the back of the van, slept all the way home and asked him to dust off the crutches in the basement when we got back to the house.

The next two weeks were devoted to the standard protocol: RICE. Rest. Ice. Compression. Elevation. With multiple helpings of Advil, Curcumin and an X-Ray just to be sure nothing was broken.

Nothing was broken.

Not even my spirit was broken.

As soon as it eased, I made a plan to finish this southern end. The benevolent universe smiled in my direction.

And put in lots of road crossings between Winding Stair Gap and Fontana Dam.

All those road crossings meant I could ease back into the thing with a series of slack packs. I could treat my ankles with the respect and care they deserve.

Let the Slack-Pack-O-Rama begin!

Like that, over the past seven days and with nary a whimper from my ankles, I've completed 50.6 more miles of the trail up to Fontana Dam.

I know. Not exactly churning up the trail. But that's how I want these last 450 total miles to go.

I want to luxuriate in the miles. To spend time discovering all the treasures along the way. To stop when I want without feeling like I'll be left behind or like I'll never make it.

Every day I'm on the trail, I'm making it. Whether I get "there" or not. If I'm on the trail, I am there, exactly where I want to be.

And if I'm not churning up the trail, I can spend more time sketching the experience. Which is just another way to deepen that experience. With a chance to relive it every time I look back through my sketchbook.

Here's how it went down:

Friday, June 29. Winding Stair Gap to Wayah Road, 5.9 miles.

Shared lunch with a little garter snake at the top of Siler Bald.

Saturday, June 30. Wayah Road to Burningtown Gap. 8.7 miles.

Pass by the stone fire tower at Wayah Bald. Stop for lunch and sketching and pondering the magnificence and (hopefully) resilience of this amazing earth.

Sunday, July 1. Burningtown Gap to Tellico Gap. 4.5 miles.

So. Many. Snails. Ralph likes to watch Bear Grylls every once in a while and he pointed out that we would never go hungry out here. I think I'll stick to blueberries.

Tuesday, July 3. Tellico Gap to the NOC. 8.4 miles.

360 degree views from Wesser Bald and we grazed on our first blueberries of the year. Okay, there were only four ripe ones, so we'd still have to supplement with snails.

Wednesday, July 4. NOC to Stecoah Gap. 13.4 miles.

I looked at the elevation profile before today's hike (big mistake), so I was kind of dreading it. Turns out, NOTHING is bad once you've hiked the White Mountains. Not even a steady climb of 3,500 feet over eight miles can compare to that day in the Wildcats. Plus, there were flowers at the top.

Thursday, July 5. Stecoah Gap to Yellow Creek Gap. 7.6 Miles.

Amazing sunrise over Stecoah Gap. I hope if I keep practicing with this sketching business that one day I'll be able to do it justice.

Friday, July 6. Yellow Creek Gap to Fontana Dam. 8.0 miles.

I am freakin' desperate for a swim right now!

I'll be off the trail for the next week. I'm presenting my foundations of Intentional Hiking at the Trail Dames Summit next weekend. Can't wait. YAY!

And starting to get ready to go to Maine in August where I'll get to luxuriate in the trail some more. With loons!

I may squeeze in the rest of the Long Trail in September.

And I'll finish the Smokies, and the last 70 miles of the Appalachian Trail in October.

Then I'll promptly start planning the next long distance hiking and sketching thing.

Random things I found useful, entertaining and/or inspiring this week:

Thing 1: Help with Going Stoveless

I'll be getting on the trail to finish the last 400 mile of the AT starting June 1...OMG, that's two weeks from today! I'm so not planning or working out like I was last year. Let's see how that goes.

Anyhoo...I've been thinking about going stoveless. You can save almost a pound of weight if you drop the stove, gas and cookset in favor of a plastic peanut better jar. It's the thought of tortillas and tuna that queers me on the whole idea. I can no longer face tuna wraps, or anything in a tortilla. Ugh.

The only question left is this: can I survive without hot coffee in the morning?

Thing 2: Another hike for the bucket list.

My To Do list of hikes is growing--Colorado Trail, Pacific Crest Trail, Long Trail, the Wonderland Trail. Now add to that the Tahoe Rim Trail. Sounds awesome and we have family in Truckee we need to visit.

Thing 3: New Word, New Concept!

The practice of baking something in order to put off doing something else you need to do.

Full disclosure: I've got banana bread in the oven as we speak because I wasn't sure I could muster a blog post today.

Procrastibaking sort of reminds me of Intentional Hiking in that I approached the activity with a question. What should I blog about today? As I creamed the butter and sugar and mashed the bananas and measured out the flour, an idea for this random list was born.

And when I'm finished with my blog post, I will reward myself with some freshly baked banana bread, Yum.

First successful session of procrastibaking under my belt.

Thing 4: Walking is a creative act

Or at least it fosters creative thinking. I've been saying that for eons. And it's nice to have my experience validated in the New Yorker...Why Walking Helps us Think.

Thing 5: Hiking season is Instagram season.

I'm going to try to continue with my daily blogging here once I get back on the trail. I've got an app to make it easier (fingers crossed). An Anker to keep my phone charged. And a newfound resolve to go slowly, practice Intentional Hiking and savor the trail.

That said, if I fall off the blogging habit, I'll surely keep up with ONE daily Instagram post @rubythroatwhiteblaze. And since I'm planning to sketch every day on the trail, I'll also be sharing my sketches @rubythroatsketches.

Spending time drawing, even drawing badly, is a way to drop us into the land of the right brain, the place in our minds through which the Divine has a prayer of cutting through our habitual stories and reaching us.

Recording your journey thorough sketching--and even the most rudimentary stick figures qualify as sketching, here--is a foundational practice of intentional hiking for several reasons.

It encourages you to slow down, which helps focus your attention on your journey.

Slowing down encourages you to pay attention to what excites you. It’s this excitement which offers clues to what gives you your deepest soul life, which is what this journey is all about after all.

It also helps you have a fuller experience by revealing things you otherwise would have missed.

It helps you get into a meditative state of flow, which is exactly the place where you meet your soul, because...

This focus and flow shuts off the chatter of the ego, which is forever trying to drown out the quiet voice of the Divine.

When you stop and spend time really looking at, and really seeing, the thing that called out to you, the experience captures so much more than what you see in front of you. It cements the memory and experience of that moment as well as the web of connected memories related to that moment. These all become indications of what excites and delights us, windows opened to our heart’s desires and our soul's requirements for fulfillment.

So no judgment about artistic ability.

No worries about having the "right" materials.

A pen or pencil and a piece of paper will do just perfectly.

The juice is in the paying attention. Sketching the journey gives us the chance to pay closer attention to the journey and to the things that excite us along the way.

RE: The silly sketch above... It doesn't look like much, but I remember so much about that moment--the heat of the day and the warm breeze ruffling the pages; the sound of the farms below my perch...donkeys, cars, machinery; the conversation I had with 82 when he passed on his way down to Daleville; how excited hikers were about getting to town. Recalling that from this one sketch then leads me to more memories of Daleville, Finnisher, BBQ, sitting with Maneater on the lawn and the motel, 82 ending up with my laundry and knowing it was mine because he'd seen me in that outfit every day for two weeks. It goes on and on and it's like it happened yesterday. All from this silly sketch.

This time, I intend to keep up with the practice, to keep doing the work, and to sit in the discomfort of not knowing how this journey will end, where I'll end up, what kind of sketching I'm capable of.

Two things I'm learning in this in-between phase...

1. Materials matter. Buy the best you can afford.

I hate my current sketchbook. It's a Strathmore Mixed Media book that was cheap at a big box craft store. I bought it before I knew what else was out there. The paper is too smooth. It doesn't grab and absorb the paint so that the paint sits on top and amuses itself making endless cauliflower blooms. I'm too far along to abandon it now. It would be fine for pen and ink work or pencil sketching only.

The point is, I'm at instruction overload. Too many tools in my tool box. Too many concepts to absorb. It's time to go back to point one. It's time to just do the work. A lot of it. Maybe choose one or two concepts and do a lot of that before trying something new.

If keeping a notebook forever handy to jot down the random bits of flotsam and jetsam that wash up on the shores of the right side of our brain is one ingredient of creative success, then the other is the ritualized review of those notes. The gleaning and ordering and reflections that allow new work to bubble up from the sea of parts.

I love the idea of a quick note about an event accompanied by a little drawing. No fancy sketching or artwork. An icon, really. A little cartoon to capture something of the moment.

I tried this for a while, but sadly fell out of the habit as a daily practice.

I resurrected the practice during my 2017 Appalachian Trail thru-hike. It was often all I could muster at the end of a 15-20 mile hiking day that was often filled to the brim with new experiences, strange characters, weird food and random awesomeness.

Who knew walking through the "green tunnel" could be so eventful?

What strikes me as I look back through my journals and logbooks from the trail, and those other logbooks that I started and stopped the year before my hike, is how much more the visual record stimulates my memory and stirs my imagination.

I find I want to linger over those visual records so much more than I want to bother with the written journal I kept in the early days of my hike when I was fresh and hiking fewer miles.

Then the magic keeps coming.

My logbook helps me recall even more details of each day, whether I noted it there or not.

Like making eye contact with the hawk that startled, flew and filled my field of vision as I walked.

The strange grunting/coughing noise we heard in the woods while eating Velveeta mac 'n cheese out of the cook pot after the violent lightening storm.

The 47 attempts to hang my bear bag my first night alone on the trail above the Mason-Dixon line.

The great scrapple debate of 2017 held in the Fireman's Social Club in Port Clinton, PA, where the welcomed us in and bought us a drink and schooled us on the merits of head cheese.

My logbook inspires me to reconnect with the people who appear in its pages and reach out where I might have held back in the past. Who knew a journal could foster human connections as well as creative connections?

My logbook forces me to get out of my comfort zone, to get out there a do stuff...because who wants to look back at a logbook that logs the same ole shit day after day?

If I were trapped in one place, though, I could challenge myself to see something different each day and use my logbook to expand the ways I experience the world.

My logbook encourages me to keep going and to honor that everyday flotsam and jetsam that doesn't look like much as it happens, but that ultimately adds up to a well-lived life in the end.

Each one had some way of tracking that unrelenting random firing of synapses, aka unrelated thoughts that spring forth without warning and dissipate quickly if not captured immediately. Usually it's just a notebook and a pen carried religiously and used frequently.

I haven't found one creative writer who doesn't have some analog system of tracking thoughts. Writers love paper it seems. And pens. And probably office supply stores.

David Sedaris says to write down EVERYTHING that grabs you; that "everybody's got an eye for something."

The Key is the Container

But the key to creativity, I think, is then pulling all the random thoughts together later. And being diligent and ritualized about transferring your jottings and your incomplete thoughts to your diary or your log book, index cards, computer, wherever. To your container for your ideas.

I think of this journal/log book as a stew pot, where ideas go to marinate, where bits of information go to meet, marry and emerge as new ideas, knowledge.

Bottom line...

Train your senses (eyes, ears, intuition, whatever) on what interests you (what you have an eye for);

Capture those interesting bits;

Transfer the small pieces into the larger container and see what emerges as new and fresh connections.

You can’t always paint what you see—sometimes you must paint what the picture needs.

— Charles Reid, Charles Reid's Watercolor Secrets

I've decided I need a project.

Specifically a sketching project.

While I've (mostly) kept up my sketch-a-day habit since November, I still struggle sometimes with not feeling inspired, not seeing the everyday with new eyes, looking around and still not seeing anything sketch-worthy.

I could approach my sketching like John Singer Sargent, who would not go in search of some exalted thing to sketch, but would just take a seat wherever and start drawing what was in front of him.

Or Danny Gregory, whose book, Art Before Breakfast, gives as an exercise sketching the same view out the window every day for a week. And who also offers the Every Day Matters Challenge--a list of 365 objects to sketch over the course of a year.

When I first started my daily sketching habit, I did a series of morning skies as seen from my kitchen window. It was teaching me a lot about how watercolor behaves...an elusive skill to master. And it was a great way to start the day, noticing what's beautiful, playing with color, appreciating the magic of watercolor meeting and mingling on the page.

I'm uncommitted to that idea. So I'm still in search of a project. Still waiting for my project to find me.

signed up for another class! (I feel like I start a lot of posts like this, learning junkie that I am.)

It’s the watercolor course through Liz Steel’s SketchingNow platform. It will be nice to have some tools for this always surprising medium (as opposed to blindly swiping colors on the page and hoping for something that’s not mud.)

The best thing? I’ve finally broken open the Moleskine watercolor journal that I’ve had for a year. I was afraid of messing up that nice paper!

And what nice paper it is. I’m testing the Moleskine watercolor journal and a Stillman & Birn Beta journal in tandem. All while I continue to fill my latest Stillman & Birn Alpha journal.

The Beta is for watercolor, so the paper is thicker and has more tooth to it. It stands up to a lot of water and I’m learning how to be brave about mixing colors right on the page and letting the watercolor do its magical thing.

S&B Beta on the top; Moleskine on the bottom.

The Alpha paper is thinner, more for ink and light washes. It tends to buckle, which I kind of like. It’s still sturdy enough to not pill and fall apart when you add water. But I think the smoother paper makes it a littler harder to control the water, and the pigment, on the page. Especially when it has buckled and created peaks and valleys to paint around.

I like the buckling...it tells me my sketchbook has been used!

ixed media journals, like the Alpha, have more pages, so they’re more economical in the long run. Stillman & Birn offers both in soft covers, so... backpacker friendly!

The Betas comes in hard and soft cover, too. Both come in a variety of sizes.

And the flip side to having a lot of pages in the mixed media journal is, obviously, having fewer pages in the watercolor journals. To me, that just means I can fill it up more quickly!

It’s like checking off the days on the calendar that tell me I managed to practice my sketching craft. A way of keeping score that compels me onward and forward. I want to keep sketching when I see those completed journals, and checked boxes, adding up!